CyberNanny is watching you...

Today's project by Angel Hernandez Matos meshes a number of interesting technologies, C++, Azure, Office Automation, and of course the Kinect for Windows...

CyberNanny: Remote Access via Distributed Components

This article is about an application called CyberNanny, which I recently wrote to allow me to remotely see my baby daughter Miranda at home from anywhere at any time. It’s written in Visual C++ (MFC) and it comprises different technologies such as Kinect and its SDK, Windows Azure, Web services and Office automation via Outlook. The project is hosted on CodePlex (cybernanny.codeplex.com), where you can check out the code or contribute to it.

Before I get into the nuts and bolts of the application, I’ll briefly explain the technologies used to build it.

C++ has been—and still is—the workhorse in many software shops. Saying that, the new standard C++ 11 takes the language to a new level. Three terms to describe it would be modern, elegant and extremely fast. Also, MFC is still around and Microsoft has been upgrading it with every new release of its Visual C++ compiler.

The Kinect technology is amazing, to say the least; it changes the way we interact with games and computers. And with Microsoft providing developers with an SDK, a new world of opportunities is unveiled for creating software that requires human interaction. Interestingly, though, the Kinect SDK is based on COM (as well as the new programming model in Windows 8, called Windows Runtime, often abbreviated as WinRT). The SDK is also available to Microsoft .NET Framework languages.

Windows Azure is the Microsoft Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that has been around for a couple of years. It provides a series of services that allow building solutions on top of them (such as Compute and Storage). One of the requirements I had with CyberNanny was the reliable delivery of messages via a highly available queue, and Windows Azure provides that.

The native use and consumption of Web services is possible using the Windows Web Services API (WWSAPI), which was introduced with Windows 7. I have a blog post (bit.ly/LiygQY) that describes a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application implementing a native component using WWSAPI. It’s important to mention that WWSAPI is built in to the OS, so there’s no need to download or install anything but the Windows SDK (for header and lib files).

Why reinvent the wheel? One of the requirements for CyberNanny was the ability to send e-mails with attached pictures, so instead of writing my own e-mailing class, I preferred to reuse the functionality provided by Outlook for this task. This allowed me to focus on the main objective: building a distributed application for looking after my baby.

This article is organized in four main sections:

Overview of the general architectural solution

Kinect architecture

Locally deployed components (native)

Cloud-hosted components (managed)

...

Locally Deployed Components (Native)

The CyberNanny project comprises the following:

Application

CCyberNannyApp (inherited from CWinApp). The application has a single member of type Nui_Core for interacting with the sensor.

In order to manipulate some of the Outlook objects, you have to import them into your project by selecting “Add MFC Class” from ActiveX Control Wizard. The objects used in this solution are Application, Attachment, Mail-Item and Namespace.

Proxy

This is a custom class that encapsulates the creation of the required objects to interact with WWSAPI.

Helper Classes

These classes are used to support the functionality of the application, such as converting a bitmap into a JPEG to reduce the file size, providing a wrapper to send e-mails and interact with Outlook, and so on.

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